Lonely Times: Fall

I know of a place near my house
Where colours dance on leaves floating in the wind.
The tall trees though are proud and silent
Bearing her absence with dignity.
They were not always so: in summer they laughed with her
But now she comes no more.

The roads are full of forgotten leaves:
Trampling over them to reach my home
I think of her; of the brown waves that danced
Their dainty way into my miserable heart.

(It was beautiful to fall for her
I was full of her and she, of me.
But now I am lonely, where is she?)

--Shyam.

Holy Monopoly

Picutre a monopoly board with squares marked Jerusalem, Vaikuntham, Paathalam, Jahannu, Jannat, Earth, Limbo etc. And picture a game with an invisible opponent with invisible dice where you move to where you are asked to, when you are asked to. Picture too that Jail is the most probable position you might end up at in simple Monopoly, and here, you have nothing but Earth that you know anything of. If it doesn't frighten you, okay; but if it does, Welcome to the Holy Monopoly, Or: How I learned to stop worrying and listen to the Voice of Religion.

I have always been confused about religion. There are people who claim it releases our latent potentialities and others who say its just an opiate for the masses. I was even troubled when I decided I was an agnostic and discovered Yann Martel roaring against the "hypocrisy" of agnostics. Religion is a difficult and thorny issue and I don't even want to start on my views on it; suffice to say, I persist in my agnosticism without affiliations to any religion, borrowing sometimes from the mystics, sometimes from the scholastics, for my ideas; and lean heavily on the Hindu Vaishnavism of my parents' for form. And while I doubt that religion (any religion at all) can be useful(forget necessity), I think people who believe otherwise have the right to persist in their ways(folly or otherwise). But whether this includes even those who indulge in publishing fatwas and carrying them out, burning up kids inside cars because their fathers preach another creed, condemning people they dont like to death on the Cross, burning alive people they don't trust etc etc, I leave to each person's conscience and understanding. The more important thing to note is that religion has always controlled social responses even where secular law purports to hold sway. I was horrified after reading this news article on rediff.com yesterday. Not just that religion controls all life, denying the heart while claiming for it reasons that the head does not understand; worse, people are ready to suffer for it even when they get nothing in return. Perhaps conformism is 'useful' to live in society; perhaps there is another world. But what price will we pay for our beliefs in this world? Does it not matter at all? Then why all the hooplah about a better world and a better life on earth?

Semper Fi: Summer

She's not here and oh the difference to me!

A thirst it sometimes takes me now
To remember summer thoughts of her:
Her eyes dripping the cool blue of happiness
Into my parched heart.
I see her now in every long womanleg
Striding from me; why did she have to go?

Ice cold this desert heart of mine
I left her cool breeze a year behind.
Summer nights I now spend sweating on my sheets
Wondering what happened to immortality.

(A breeze, she came, then left, blowing off
The candle I held to her face.
And now it is dark, where is she?)

--Shyam.

Tags and Itches

A new day and a new tag, or more poetically, in German, "Neuer Tag, neues 'tag'". Again by arethusa. And this is a real tough one :-).

Three Names I go By
Shyam
Shyamu
Shyami ... this was easy

Three Screen Names
shyam_iitm
madatadam
shyam

Three Physical Things I Like about myself
My arms
My legs
My eyes(?) ... this was a really difficult question

Three Physical Things I dont like about myself
My tummy :-)
My nose - its an Indian map if u know what I mean
My ears - elephants have winnows for ears not men

Three Parts of my Heritage
Madras
Notre Dame
Kumbakonam (my mother says so)

Three Things that scare me
Nothing scares me really though some things frighten me at times.. Anyways 3 of these:

Life & Relationships (read People & Society :-))
A purposeless life
Not doing/getting what I am supposed/want to do/get & the possibility of there being no point anyways

Three things I want in a relationship
Fun - lots of it
Honesty & Understanding/Empathy - helps :-)
A middle ground - neither too close as to smother nor too far as to be indistinguishable from someone else

Three physical things about the opposite sex that appeal to me

A beautiful face
The Goldilocks figure (neither too tall nor too short, neither too fat nor too slim etc)
A nice smile

Three Things I want to do badly right now
Go Home and read a nice book (im at work now :-()
Get away to India/Europe for a long vacation
Put my head in a sack and hide myself (u know why)

Three Places I want to go on vacation
The Highlands and most of Britain
Italy - esp Rome, Florence and Venice
Paris

Three Things to do before I die
Resolve all the problems I have/face (would hate to die saying, "Houston we have a problem")
Read all that is written & understand all that is said (yeah right)
Experience all I can... and of course the usual help as many as I can

Three of my everyday essentials
My computer
Books
Tennis/Food/Sleep - really guys none of the 3 is an everyday essential though tennis would come close

Three Things I am wearing right now
Three huh... would hv been tough if I were at home :P
My watch
Old jeans
Torn slippers... i'll leave out the other items of clothing and my poonal :)

Three Reasons I am posting this
I am a masochist
I am a good liar
I love high adrenaline stuff & bungee-jumping :-)

Of course I have taken out the stuff Shy herself took out. Also I can't think of anybody to tag and continue this. But if anybody who reads this would like to, why dont u just drop me a line and i'll edit this post:)

Too Many Books ....

So what happened is arethusa, you know, tagged me, and here I am, all tagged and confused. I have to say something about books and all that you know. And I like books and, really, a lot of books too. And they also like me you know. And so, here you see, these are some things I want to say about

1. Books I own:
Books are Absolutely Indispensable. I could almost say I have lived more of my time with books than with people. And so I have a few books though the library and the net have always been the prime sources for my reading material. This is the list of books that I cherish most among the ones I own:
Ulysses & Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce, The Portable Nietzsche, Dialogues of Plato, Complete Poems of Donne, Complete Works of Shakespeare, The Rubaiyat, The Portable Milton, The Stranger by Camus, Moby Dick and The Bhagavad Gita.

2. Books I recently bought:
I keep buying books on and off. When the eBay bug bites me usually. In the last month or two, these are the books I bought: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and The Tragedies of Shakespeare.

3. Books I am reading now:
Books for light reading I finish off quickly and in that section I am reading 'India Wins Freedom' by Maulana Azad and Jane Eyre. Some books I read slowly, and in this section I am reading 'A Kierkegaard Anthology', Buber's 'I and Thou', some Schopenhauer, assorted stuff on Indian History and some Aristotle. There are a few books, however, that I read and re-read often and again, sometimes in parts and sometimes in the whole. In this section are Joyce, Milton, Donne, Shakespeare, the Gita and Cioran.

4. My Favorites:
This should take a long time. I usually read as much for the author as for the book. So most favs will be authors rather than books.

Literature: Joyce - The Dubliners and The Portrait are by themselves guarantee to fame and the 2 most unreadably bold wonderful books ever are also his. Ulysses, my all-time fav. Shakespeare- enough has been said about him. Dostoevsky - Haunting. And Beautiful. Hardy, Dickens - Beautiful. And Haunting. Huxley, Orwell - Nice. Sometimes Daunting. Rushdie, Marquez - Magical. Realism. India. Latin America. Hot! Also for poetry, Donne, the Sufis, Dickinson, the Romantics, some Browning, TS Eliot and some snatches from the moderns. Others - Pride&Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, much of Scott and Wodehouse - fun and perennial favs for lighter reading.

Fantasy/Sci-Fi: Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time turns! Tolkien - He didnt write only LOTR! Douglas Adams - In Parts. Asimov - Theres too much I havent read but really good. AC Clarke - Of Course.

Philosophy: Plato - kickstarting Science and Philosophy as we know it, and open and sublime as we don't know how(with the eternal crowd-puller The Gadfly). Hume - No miracles here! Kant - Just cant read him. Schopenhauer - For the sheer weight of his studied Pessimism. Kierkegaard - Positive Religious Existentialism - I am searching too for "an idea that I could live and die for". Nietzsche- no one writes more lyrical philospohy - not even his mentor Plato. Cioran- Worthy successor to Nietzsche. I can just see the little blue light at the end of the tunnel too.(Plus he was insomniac when young :-)). Russell - Philiosophy for the layman. Math and Logic for the Scientist. And Literature for the Nobel Committee. Camus, Sartre - Lit/Phil - take ur pick. But they should be going out of fashion now, no?!. Every now and then, pick up Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius or the Gita for comfort.

I am sure I have missed a few but thats the way it is. And of course, I tag Cue, Sudheer and Varath to post on their fav books etc.

Madras Pettai Wiki

The wikipedia has been around too long for me to talk much about it. But this one has really been illuminating. For all those who have been exposed to the colourful & pure pettai baashai of singaara chennai.

A Hard Night's Day

As the sun starts reaching out, feeling around, with its first tentative rays, the empty blue sky stolen off a Renaissance artist's canvas, I am tempted to say with Theoden, "And so it begins." Another night has passed me by and I am still trying to configure the SuSE installed on my computer to perform at its best. And all the work that I have neglected the last couple of days glares at me from a corner, promising, with a malignant smile, headaches for days to come. But it has been nice and I have had fun tweaking my notebook and learning to write shell scripts and other silly things. Not to forget enjoying a special screening of Amadeus at 4am, sparing no thought for the other three poor souls who inhabit my house and, unlike me, sleep during the night.

As a movie, Amadeus is quite a treat. I had seen the second half of the movie before and wanted to see the whole movie. The colour of late 18th century Vienna and the music of Mozart: what more can a movie ask for? The actors have done their parts well too and no wonder the movie won so many Oscars(though Titanic has made the awards largely meaningless). Anyways, good company for 3 hours(nearly) though the version I saw seemed to me edited.

Also spent some time on the Advani controversy. It seems funny to me that there should be an argument at all whether Jinnah was 'communal'. He wanted a Muslim 'quam' and that by definition makes him communal. The word 'communal' has been mauled so badly that it has become a petty gaali now. But Israel is 'communal' and most of the countries in the Middle-East are theocratic and we have no problems maintaining good relations with them. So why does it matter only so close to home? It is an ugly thing and I wouldn't want it sneaking into my home but a foreign state is welcome to do what it wills as long as it doesn't (interfere with)/(tend to affect) my stuff. That, I know everyone knows, is the core principle of sovereignity of nations. And, if you do steal my toothbrush, it doesn't make sense for me to just yell at you,"You lousy St.Patrick's School ruffian". Strong typecasting is useful only in so many scenarios and international relations, I think, is not one of them.

On the other hand, if at all we need to consider Jinnah's career, let us place him on par with the other leaders of the Freedom Struggle, and, for every Chauri Chaura that we excuse, strike off a Lahore or a Punjab on his side. Not to absolve him of his short-sightedness but to understand that he was a man with limitations as was every person who extracted his/her pound of salt. And since the history of our freedom struggle is too close by us to analyse it critically, without bias, let us instead ask other, more important questions regarding our future relations with our estranged cousin Pakistan. A couple of good reads in rediff.com were satisfying but the question lingers. And so the show does go on, it seems, in India. Oh, by the way, it was 'Hindustan' last I heard.

It has been a long, dark tea-time for me, this vacation from reality, this day of darkness, but now that it is getting lighter and brighter, I must sneak back into my coffin, so adios all and auf wiedersehen.

Off the line musings on online friendships

Man, says the sage, is a social animal and Agent Smith assures us he is a virus. Both ideas seem agreeable and we often see man aspiring towards that characteristic peculiar to a virus, 'immortality in culture'. Another aspect both man and the virus share is the tendency to cluster close together, creating unforeseaable affinities. 'Friends', my friends, is the name of the game, and making and keeping as many as you can is what it is all about.

In my schooldays, friendships were made only in playgrounds and backyards. Sure there was an occassional friend made out of a fellow-sufferer at the dentist's, but the more modern innovation of the penpal was something one in his real senses just frowned at. A friend, by definition, is someone who is there for you, someone you share the details of your life with; and a letter can get only so far in real life unlike in movies. The friend across the seas, a person after your own nature, someone to lean on in times of trouble and the first to rejoice on a happy occassion, was only a mythical beast the lonely had dreamed up. But all this was destined to change with the arrival of the internet and yahoo, among other things. Myth became legend, then history, and finally seeped into everyday life, as messengers carrying friendship-tokens became ubiquitous and smiles and tears alike were simulated and the mythical beast realised in a jumble of wires and machines. And people were hooked.

It was not entirely surprising given the near universal reach of the internet; but what beggars belief is the number of adherents the internet has found in all classes and ages. Kids who can't spell 'connectivity', and grandfathers who obstinately refused to give in to modern innovations like the vacuum cleaner or the washing machine, were alike into it and the net just grew wider and wider. The internet itself is a much huger proposition, but friendship got a new meaning within this context. People found new 'thingies' like the yahoo messenger and hotmail to make friends with and get to speed with others they had lost touch with. And it was a boon for all those who couldn't get to know their neighbours better as it was easy as a click to add another friend.

The latest craze, at least in circles I move in, are the make-a-pal-online sites like orkut, which are exclusively devoted to friend-making. These sites allow people to get to know others and keep tabs on what is happening with one's friends and acquaintances. They also foster in some people a new fever for number-of-friends and promote vicarious relationships where login-name and login-name share intimacies. The trouble, and this without malice aforethought I say, is that this new development weakens as much as it strengthens our friend-making abilities. For an old-timer like me, it is economical to have a few friends to offload my emotional surplus on(and receive that of others), but as the numbers grow bigger, it becomes difficult to maintain and cherish an unseen friend(though I indeed have many valuable friends because of the internet).

It is hard, I say again, not impossible; and often a flesh-and-blood friendship seems more 'real'. This is reflected in the logically sequent occurrence of online friends attempting to meet in real-life and continue from where they left off in the world wide web: a consummation, so to say, of the ritual began online, miles away from each other. Here the friendship-sites play to their strength as facilitators and catalysts to friendship. They function as forums where like-minded people meet and get to know each other - friendship is facilitated as people are encouraged by initial exchanges to meet and understand one another. And then a friendship is supposed to have begun; at least so it says in my ancient handbook.

Where the economics of money and time hinders an actual meeting, of course, these sites are the ultimate sanctuary. They open up vistas that are hidden deep in the mad superstructure of our world and connect people who cannot afford a 'real' friendship. They redefine friendship and make people like me sit up and notice that we inhabit a changing world: a world where the old dog has to learn new tricks. And in learning to adapt ourselves, we learn too that life takes its meaning through change.

Anyways, it is a fun thing and new(read cool). After the bubble burst, something had to come out of it all and I guess this is one direction that it was always predictable the net would take. Let what comes next try to be as successful.

PS : As a technical aside, I have been wondering if these sites actually tend to work towards their own destruction. Promoting the creation of a fully-connected set of friends, the records in the site databases must tend to grow as the square of the number of users if everyone tries to become everyone else's friend. This is only vaguely possible but a super-linear growth in space required to connect everybody seems a distinct possibilty. And I suppose the designers of these sites will have only a linear growth in space with users for reasons of economics, which means there has to come a point in time when there are more records to handle and not enough space. (A friend says space-constraints are no longer critical in the computing world, but I persist, as space and time constraints are interlinked and the scenario I predict is bound to occur as an asymptote with high probability).

Who said only cockroaches are nocturnal?

It is official now: I have become completely nocturnal these days and no joking. There were forebodings of my predilection for the darker half of the diurnal span even in my high-school days; but never has it been so regular nor persistent. It is a rare sun these days that finds me asleep when it rises, or awake when it is at its zenith. And, very often, when I have some work to do in the day, my body-clock adjusts itself so that I revert back to my nightly life as efficiently as possible. A party animal's body I possess maybe, or maybe an ascetic's, but neither shoe fits me anyways. And the best I can hope for is that I possess a certain(unrealized) greatness of character(though most people who know me would discount the possibility), for Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita,

yaa nishaa sarvabhootanaam tasyaam jaagarti samyamee|
yasyaam jaagrati bhootaani saa nishaa pashyatho muneh||

which, in the vulgar tongue, translates to "The sage(who controls his whole being) is awake when it is night to all creatures; and when all creatures are awake, then is it night to the sage who sees(understands all)."

Pretty neat huh! Only I hope I can withstand the pressure that my father says I am burdening my body with, not letting it lead a normal life :-).

Mackinac Island - II

The next day we woke up bright and early around 7am, which meant we were missing the earliest ferry to the Island. After a light breakfast that the motel provided and a few snaps of the lake in the early morning sun, we got out of the motel to catch the ferry at 9. There are quite a few companies offering ferry services for $18 or so the round-trip. The ferryboat was quite cool as they had an observation deck high up, standing on which we got a spectacular view of the lake and small humps of islands dotting it all round. Snap-time again and we braved a light drizzle, cold air and swarms of insects to admire the small infinity in space and time that the lake in its calm expansiveness portrayed.

It took us about 20 minutes to reach the Island and even as we landed there was this cabby with a Lincoln-beard on a 3-horse carriage. Talk of a quaint island! And there weren't any motor vehicles on the island and the only means of transport was the horse-carriage or the bicycle. Maps are freely available at the Tourist Information Center and the lady manning the desk was quite helpful as she pointed out a few of her favorite spots and marked a route for us to take.

Bicycles are as easy to obtain as fudge on the island and come in as many flavors; we got the 7-geared cycles that sit low and have a basket attached to the handle-bar, making you feel like a spinster going to church on Sunday. Anyways we pedalled out of the docks with a plan of going along the Shoreline Road to either Arch Rock or Fort Mackinac. The houses on the road were quaint(did I use the word again?) and the shoreline simply breathtaking. There is an old forlorn lighthouse standing out a small distance out to sea and a few projections of land jutting out of the lake on all sides. And if we but ignore the small piece of land we were standing on, borrowed from the lake in some prehistoric period when man was still learning to balance himself on two legs in a remote corner in Africa, a sense of the all-swallowing nature of water and its wilfulness teaches us the first lessons in futility. But it is beautiful too with its green and blue and the haze that settles every now and then, sometimes obscuring, at other times revealing, the content of our dreams.

The road leading to the Fort and Arch Rock is a real strain and leads up a steep hill. An elderly gentleman living in the island offered that it became harder each passing year and we weren't making much more headway than him. Then an alley of colonial or late 19th century houses with mock columns and colonnades and spacious patios looking towards the sea(). Trails crisscross the whole island and after an eyeful of the pretty houses and the far-out sea, it was getting late so we hit a few that seemed to take us to the Fort quicker.

Going is tough in this stretch as the road and the trails go up and down. But we reached Skull Cave in one piece without much adventure. This Cave is where an English fur-trader is supposed to have hidden when the Indian Wars erupted in the Island. There is not much to it as the Skull seems to have been chipped away by time and the elements and we climbed a few flights of rough wooden stairs to reach Fort Holmes. The Fort is a rough stockaded enclosure that the English wrested from and held against the American troops in the War of 1812. Not much but enough to provide some fun to kids playing Indians and Cowboys with plastic darts and guns. The place affords yet another view of a vast portion of the lake and a plaque provided us with the history of the Lake Algonquin and the breaking of the land and the surfacing of these islands. Indians native to these parts won't agree but we heard their story only when we got to Arch Rock, where some great God had breathed life into the world.

Fort Mackinac is only a little way from Skull Cave and Fort Holmes. It is grand though no castle but the entry fee was forbidding enough at $10 or so for us to witness a demonstration of the firing of a real cannon and a guided tour of the rooms where the quartermasters hid their young girls. Cycle back and we reach Arch Rock: I had assumed all this time that it was 'Arch' as in 'First' as some God is supposed to have created life here. But as all deductions from internal evidence go, it is superficial and a rock in the shape of a huge arch a hundred or two feet high loomed up in our sights. More pictures and more sea and more awe and then back to the Main Road for lunch.

Lunch was pizza again for me and a few glasses of wine and we basked in the afternoon sun on the lakefront. Then fudge-shopping and fudge-eating on the green meadows with a few more snaps of some old bloke in bronze hiding our view of the whitewashed fort entrance. A few calm minutes, fudge in mouth, grass under feet, brooding over the lake splashing its waters in disquieting calm, and back to business. This time we take the shoreline road going the other way round the island and a few minutes into it, stop at a stretch of pebbly beach, tossing stones into the lake and feeling the cold wash up from afar on waves. There is a Devil's Kitchen here too and a few charred boulders hanging on. Some fine words written about this being an ancient burial ground and a keynote in the geographical history of the area; we pass on.

Trails again and I run into the forest in search of the source of a brook. After a few falls and a few more snaps(we really took only snaps of ourselves all the time), we decide that trails are fun. So, after reaching the British Landing Point, where they have a cannon pointing at the lake for no apparent reason, we decided to split up, with Srinath and Mahesh taking the shoreline Road while I, Ganti and Sheetal plotted our way through Swamp Trail and Tranquil Bluff and what-else-not, promising to meet the others at the Tourist Information Center.

This was supposed to be fun but we found out soon that Swamp Trail actually led us through a swamp and we got through brambles and missed trail junctions and after huffing and puffing through the best part of an hour reached a beautiful avenue. The Grand Hotel is situated here and there are a few mansions too but mostly it is meadows and quaint(not again!) roads that transported us downhill at breakneck speeds and earned for us the snorts of disapproving horses. There is a museum on our way and a roadsign indicates a blacksmith working nearby but it was getting dark and we hurried past cabs and bikes moving peacefully, gawking at unearthly sights, and so back to the crowds on Main Street. The cycles are duly handed over and some sludge and cola partaken of. The crowd seems to have swelled and there are lots of Indians(the Asian kind), apparently on honeymoons or a quiet vacation and with the least disturbance, we return on a ferryboat back to Mackinaw City.

It was already 8pm by now and so we decided to stay back and start off early for home the next day. Before crashing, however, we went across to St.Ignace on the Mackinac Bridge, the third longest bridge in the world, passing on our way the historic Fort Michilimackinac, founded in 1715. There was also a beach for celebrities to frolic on but time, as they say, was dear.

St.Ignace itself was a boring, sleepy town and costly too compared to our motel of last night. A dinner of subs in St.Ignace and we hastened back to Mackinaw City. Other places were either costlier or rooms were not available so we went back to our cheap motel spending another $49 on a night's rent.

Not much to plan for the next day and a long road home with me as the navigator. I plot a way through some 'scenic routes' but all we get is a county jailhouse and lots of biker babes. Anyways Detroit is only a few hours away and we all have fun on the road, each in his own way. Detroit itself, we don't get to see much of as it is dark by the time we reach Sheetal's hotel and we book a ticket from Toledo, Ohio to Notre Dame on Amtrak. A light dinner at Chili's and a failed attempt to visit a nightclub, and it is time to start off for the Toledo railway station. Its about an hour and a half's drive from Warren, Sheetal's place, but only 35 minutes from downtown Detroit, and a few missed turns don't matter as the train is only at 4:50 in the morning.

Toledo seems like an interesting town with a nice bridge across a river and a fine skyline. There seems to have been some problem in the area as we pass quite a few police cars on our way to the railway station. But the cops are helpful and we reach the station at around 4am. The train is late as usual but Sheetal takes his leave and we curl up for a light nap.

Finally, around 5:30am, the train chugs in and we are home by 8. We take a cab home and then its back home again. A fine vacation it has been and a long break from the drudgery that is life in research but everything can wait as we take a long, peaceful day of rest and sleep.

Mackinac Island - 1

I have always been accused of being a sedentary creature and have borne out its truth too, often enough. So when summer came around and I was still home not venturing into the beautiful days that were dawning in and around Notre Dame, not many were surprised. Work is good and sleep better and all comforts are available inside my small room north of campus so why bother? Anyway, I was quite contented with occassional glimpses of the sun from my bedroom window until the Wanderlust gripped me when Sheetal Kiran, a friend from India, who had come to Detroit on official business, visited us in his SUV and suggested we take a road-trip to some nice place in Michigan for the Memorial Day long weekend.

I and three other friends at Notre Dame, Ganti, Mahesh and Srinath, were quite happy to accept the offer but none of us had a license nor were confident of driving an SUV. But Sheetal said he could drive on the whole trip by himself and we set about planning the trip. After initial discussions we settled on Grand Rapids and Mackinac Island but people were uncomfortable about spending too much time away from research(yeah right!). Finally we decided to just pass through the town of Grand Rapids on our way to Mackinac Island, stay overnight at Mackinaw City in the mainland, take a ferry the next day to the Island itself and see how things went from there.

Packing for the trip was minimal and we were ready to start early the next afternoon. Ganti volunteered to be the navigator and I just lay back on the backseat of the SUV for a contented sleep. We had a DVD player on board and had picked up our Lord of the Rings DVDs but everyone tired of seeing it for the nth time. My Simon&Garfunkel CDs were also not agreeable to some and we fell back upon the default Indian film music CD everyone was OK with.

Mackinac Island is near the northern border of Michigan with Canada and Notre Dame is very close to the Indiana-Michigan border. The entire distance, as the crow flies, to use a favourite expression of Mahesh's, was about 300 miles. We could have done the trip in 6-7 hours flat but since Sheetal was to be the only driver, we decided to take it slow and rest every now and then in various cities. The first leg to Holland, MI, was north-westerly and we got really close to Lake Michigan's shoreline. After losing ourselves in Holland for quite sometime, trying to figure out the way to downtown Holland, we had a lunch of pizzas in what was advertised to be the best pizzeria in Michigan or something like that. The food was not really satisfying but we picked up some coffee and got out of Holland at about 2:30pm. The plan to pass through Grand Rapids was dropped as we were already looking at something like 10 or 11pm when we would hit Mackinaw City and we charted a new route direct to the City taking the State Highway at M-... and joining I-... near Lake City. Again we lost our way trying to get onto I-..., and went all across Holland. We ventured into some residential areas and there was quite some ogling of pretty girls and teasing of each other as we behaved like teenagers. I even suggested we continue along the road and hit Lake Michigan for a small beach-party in the afternoon but sanity prevailed and, inspite of and with the help of Srinath's constant interjections, we managed to hit the road to Mackinaw City.

The traffic on I-... was quite heavy with lots of people hitting the road for the long weekend and soon we were forced to a crawl. I was already feeling the effects of the sun and lunch, lying comfortably on the backseat with only Mahesh's laptop for company and dozed off. After an hour or so, I was woken up when we stopped at a gas station at Cedar Springs to fill gas and get some coffee. It might have been the lurching of the SUV or my disaffection towards travel but I had a big headache and dozed on and off till we reached Mackinaw City. The stop at the gas-station was short and when we had bought some goodies to munch, took to the road again.

The next stretch was perhaps the best in the whole trip as we got to see the Land of Lakes in all its glory in the late afternoon sun. The sky was a little overcast and there was a chill breeze but the beauty of a vast land, in long stretches untamed by man or shaped only so much as to reflect its natural beauty, took our breath away. A cool breeze and thankfully only intermittent traffic now and signs of civilization provided us all the opportunity to click away and enjoy "nature."

We stopped for a bit at Lake City after a few wrong turns and serendipitous visits to scenic inland lakes to stretch our legs and get some stuff. A few more clicks of us at the lakeshore and a few cans of Mountain Dew and a packet of potato chips and we were back on our way. It was near 8pm now and already getting dark and so we made some haste on this part of the journey. The only other stop was at a rest area very close to Mackinaw City, where there was an observation point high up and a stunning view across the land in the setting sun. And an hour after that we were in Mackinaw City.

Mackinaw City itself is a historical place with Fort Michilimackinac, a French/British post of old and a few other attractions. The Mackinac Bridge linking it to St.Ignace across Lake Huron is the third longest bridge in the world and we proposed to go across it once atleast for photos. But it was 10 by the time we reached Mackinaw City and so our first concern was for a place to stay the night and get some dinner. There was a cheap motel on the lakeside that offered breakfast in the morning and after unloading our stuff in the room, we went into the town.

Most shops were closed but there was an old-world charm to the place even without people. There was only pizza to be had and we decided to explore the place till pizza arrived. But all we did was have some fun in a video-games parlor and soon it was time for another round of unappetizing pizza. After the unsatisfying dinner, Ganti and Srinath decided to fold up at around 12 while the other 3 of us went on a walk that took us through the beach and into Mackinaw City, and after some useless observations concerning the number of tourists and the seasonal business of the few bed and breakfast places about the place, we headed back to sleep. The plan was to get up early and catch the 7:30 ferry to the Island but that is another story.

Cinderella Man

Forget Rocky and Raging Bull. Forget Seabiscuit and Million Dollar Baby. Forget even the old Tamil flick with Prabhu in the lead whose name I have already forgotten. For if you don't, you might just not enjoy Cinderella Man, the latest inspirational movie directed by Ron Howard. The movie is a biopic on the 1920-30's boxer James J. Braddock, and has elements liberally sprinkled that might just want you to compare it with those other movies where the hero is a washed-up has-been, who holds firm to his principles and family and, just when everyone has forgotten him, pushes himself to the top against all odds and the best of the next generation.

Russell Crowe stars as the boxer, legendary for his right hook, and Renee Zellwegger is the typical homemaker of the 30's, quiet, loving, the mother of 3 kids and fearing for her husband's health in the ring. The movie starts off in 1928 with Braddock KOing his opponent and carrying a hefty wad of greenbills to his pretty wife. But disaster strikes soon and he is left with injuries to his right hand and heavy losses in failed speculations as the Depression rolls in. In 1933, we see him struggling to get work at the docks, and soon his boxing license revoked by the local commission chief Johnston, played well by Bruce Mcgill.

The times are harsh and the family finds it hard to get food and milk on the table. Electricity is lost to mounting unpaid arrears and Braddock finds himself all 'prayed up' as God seems to punch him hard and fast where it hurts. He is forced to apply for assistance from the government and even begs from his boxing associates but manages to keep his family together.

Here, luck favours him as his old manager Joe Gould(Paul Giamatti of Sideways fame) finds a bout that nobody is ready to take on at short notice and the Commission agrees for a single bout comeback. Everyone is agreed that he is in the ring to lose but, in spite of being starved and injured, he manages to KO Corn Griffin, and becomes an instant sensation. Joe persuades Johnston to let him take on the challengers for the heavyweight title and goes to the extent of selling off the last of his possessions to let Braddock practise. The gamble pays off and Braddock keeps winning and gets to fight Max Baer(Craig Bierko), a bear of a man, who has already killed 2 people in the ring, for the title. Baer is flamboyant and promises to kill him but our man holds his cool, and egged on by the millions down on their luck, who find a reason to cheer for one of their kind and to whom he is the 'Cinderella Man,' the living fairy tale, he manages to hold his own against Baer through fifteen gruelling rounds to emerge champion.

The movie is well-directed and though we know what to expect, there are a few surprises even in the real story. Paddy Considine, as Braddock's friend from the docks, who dies trying to organize and unionize Hooverville, manages to impress with a neat portrayal. As the manager, Paul Giamatti is impressive with his snappy comebacks that irritate Johnston and the scene where he lets Renee Zellwegger into his barely furnished apartment and explains his situation is great. And the church scene where Renee walks in and finds it filled with people praying for her husband and waiting for the live commentary to begin on the radio is amusing and touching.

The actors have done their job well and Russell Crowe must find it easy by now to do heroes who are quiet and manage to 'do the thing.' Renee Zellwegger plays the role of a loving wife who has to support her husband through a crisis, waiting patiently for her man to get them out of all the mess around her. The supporting cast too have played their parts and Bierko as Baer and McGill as Johnston are especially convincing in their roles.

The script is well-written and the direction and cinematography is superb. The boxing scenes are gory but manage to get you to the seat's edge as the boxers sway and hook and dance and jab through their bouts. The director manages to explore all the 'senti' he can but stops short of making it all mushy. The dialogues are crisp and the editing reminds one of 'The Gladiator' in parts as flashbacks and imagined sequences sometimes crowd Braddock's thoughts.

Overall, a nice movie to watch and inspirational too, if you go for that kind of fare. But, simply for the acting and the director's sticking to the real-life plot, its interesting. And, as the CNN reviewer points out, its a movie that symbolizes the 1930's when America had to pull itself up from a deep trench, and also for the current world where heroes who fight hard and honest are in short supply.

No French for Federer!!!

It seemed like the Australian Open would be the only one to escape his grip this year but Roger Federer has lost in another Grand Slam semifinals and I am reminded of the English newspaper headline proclaiming the Don's failure, when in a tour match he fell after only a century. He has seemed as invincible as the great Don and as prolific in collecting records the past year that his defeats (this is only his 3rd this year) are so disappointing. Federer, seeking to fill the empty space in his trophy cabinet where a Paris souvenir should be, stumbled and fell today at the French Open, to the hard-hitting teenager from Mallorca, Rafael Nadal. It was like deja vu, as Federer, who had lost the Australian Open semis to birthday boy Safin, found in Nadal a spirited customer on clay on his 19th birthday. The 6-3,4-6,6-4,6-3 win meant Nadal entered the finals with the chance of being the first man in 23 years since the Swede Mats Wilander to win the French Open on debut. It also meant that the Federer Express had halted once again in the sluggish red clay of Paris and would have to wait a year before another attempt at a career slam.

I had put a night-out to watch the match, touted as the match of the season already, given the incredible form the two players have been in this year. Nadal was coming in on a 22 match streak with 5 clay titles and a 46-6 record, while Federer was on a 11 match, 28 set streak, with a 46-2 record. The previous meeting in Hamburg had been a close call for Federer, who was just two points away from losing the Masters Series Title, before he shifted gears and zoomed past a tired Nadal. The two men were also paired up nicely in their skills and strengths with booming forehands and lightning racket-speeds and were the most exciting players in the Tour.

Anyways I was quite excited about the match-up in spite of it being on the boring, slow clay when the beautiful, fast grass of Wimbledon was my favourite. NBC were telecasting the match at 10ET according to the TV schedule but I had no clue as to whether we were on ET or CT (yeah even after 2 years here :(). At 10 though(the correct time!), there was still the earlier semifinal going on owing to a 90 minute delay due to rain. This match (Davydenko vs Puerta) dragged on into the 5th set while I managed to catch a good half-hour's sleep and then the stage was set.

The very first point was awesome with Nadal hitting a looping forehand winner down the line on the slide to a lazy but precise Federer approach shot. It was as if the players had been on court for a couple of hours, both finding their groove so early. But that was only the beginning. From then on, the match oscillated between the sublime and the ridiculous with both players coming up with some beautiful shots and some outrageous errors. Federer was not his usual serving self, with only around 65% 1st serves in, in the first set, and was broken 4 times while Nadal himself was broken once. But after about 45 minutes of huffing and puffing interspersed with a few imperious forehand winners on either side, Nadal took the set 6-3.

Federer was expected to fight back and fight back he did, racing to a 5-1 lead in the second, with quite a few winners and a higher 1st serve pct of ~80. Nadal put up some resistance but it was too late and Federer took the set 6-4. Nadal seemed to have lost it in the middle of the set when a slight drizzle forced a short delay and Federer got his act together with 10 winners and fewer errors.

Now the contest was heating up and a fight-to-the-death was what the crowd had paid for. Honors were even with a break traded apiece until 5-4 when Nadal came up with a great defensive lob on the stretch that Federer could only bat down into play after some backpedaling, setting Nadal up for a great forehand after a couple of shots. Set: Nadal. Score: 2 sets to 1 Nadal.

It was all Nadal now and Federer was just fighting to stay in the match. It was getting dark and if Federer won the set, McEnroe predicted that the final set would be played tomorrow. Federer struggled to stay on serve with Nadal and was constantly looking at the chair umpire to get out of the darkening court. He had lost his serve completely with only about 20% 1st serves in and was trying his best to put up a decent fight. The crowd was now fully behind Nadal and a fan's heckling caused a momentary lapse in concentration as Federer double-faulted in the 8th game to give Nadal the crucial break. After that, it was all over and Nadal wrapped up the set in the next game on his 2nd matchpoint, to enter the finals, a strong contender for the crown against the unseeded Argentine Mariano Puerta.

I was disappointed that the projected heavyweight showdown turned out to be a damp squib as there was lots of spraying the ball around, especially by Federer who compensated for the 40-odd winners he hit with 40-odd unforced errors. Nadal was consistent most of the time, forcing Federer to hit 2 or 3 winners often to get one point: conceding nothing and playing for his life literally. Federer was unlucky too a few times when the ball clipped the net, once surprising him in his volley and a couple of times setting up Nadal for a winner. The match was scrappy and in the dog-fight-dog competition, Nadal proved more tenacious and deserved to be the winner. He is also bound to win the final against unsung Puerta, unless many planets go awfully out of orbit, and that will be one match I won't lose sleep for.

Appogiatura

It is not easy to notice that I have mis-spelt the word "appoggiatura" in the title of the blog. If you are not into music theory or are not named Anurag Kashyap, chances are you don't know to spell the word. This word meaning "an embellishing note, usually one step above or below the note it precedes and indicated by a small note or special sign," was what finally decided the winner in the 78th Scripps Spelling Bee this year. The event was interesting as ever and provided for a lot of the suspense and nail-biting moments that a standard thriller does. And it threw up a very pertinent question at me: what is the point of these Spelling Bees anyway?

Granted the final 3 competitors were all of Indian origin, which made me feel proud and embark on another of my mera-bharat-mahan moods, I still felt a little queasy that 11 year-old kids like Samir Patel spend lots of their time trying to know how a word like 'Roscian,' which in all probability they wouldn't ever be hearing again in their lives, is spelt. Kids like him have special talents, agreed; but why test them on skills that are not really essential in life?

Don't jump on me saying how important good spelling is and how verbal skills are a good indicator of intellectual ability; what I am cribbing about here is the point to which people take the whole thing. And this leads to the more controversial question: is competition really good? For it is clear that the Bees go to these lengths only because there are people who can go these lengths.

People have different talents and want to display them to the world. In a media-oriented world where the ordinary man can get his 5 minutes of fame using his 'special' talents in any of the hundreds of talent hunts or reality shows quite easily, it often becomes a rat-race to the telephone trying to get into some show or the other. While I have nothing against the shows as such where they are concerned with the development and promotion of talent (which, incidentally, is an overused word nowadays in my opinion), they also give the common man a taste for the uncommon. What this means to the kid, whose father has always dreamed of being a rocket-scientist or cricket captain, is that, from an early age he/she is forced to try and be the best and grab all possible attention. Brats are created and worse, children who have rarely experienced the freedom that childhood offers. Even as I felt a wistful envy towards Swami and Friends when I was younger, I am afraid the next generation might not hear of him (except of course those whose fathers are into quizzing and literature).

Single-mindedness is, I believe, an attribute desirable among older people, if among any at all; and to make a kid do the whole hog from early morning painting classes to school to evening chess coaching to weekend football training and piano lessons with tuitions liberally spread all over, is simply not fair. The world can go round as fast as it wants to and seats in the IITs and Stanford and MIT get as rare as they can but a child's mind is more stunted by the mad urge to compete all the time. I would have liked to take piano lessons as a kid too but to apply evolution theory and to fit me up for survival anticipating this might just have killed the fun in it for me. And fun is all childhood is about: its fun to play, fun to learn new things, fun to do cool stuff and fun to grow up into a more mature life where you work hard and try and set out to realize your dreams.

Kids need to be encouraged and their talents brought out but to make it the focus of their entire life and make them celebrities too early might make them really brittle soon. I understand that the 3 Spelling Bee kids I started off with are having fun in their lives but the problem is that, in the driveway to Success, there are lots of other kids and not-so-kids-anymore and many of these are left broken and bruised by what they dont understand and a sobering influence is sometimes helpful where people are patted on the shoulder and told "You are doing great. Just try your best and have fun." Success is a dearly desired thing and working hard for it often exhilarating but it pays to remember that an OD of anything kills real fast and bad.

Anyways I am blogging fast and furious now hoping to kill time till 10am when the Federer-Nadal clash starts. Just salivating at the thought of watching two of the best players in the circuit pairing off once again. Bound to be a cracker if ever there was one!!

The Way I Write

Following on the resolve to blog regularly, I next have to resolve on the style that I will use in the writing of my blogs (as also my general writing style) . This is an important aspect for me as content alone cannot suffice: I have promised myself to learn to use language; as I feel language is as much a process as it is a medium. What I write is important but the way I write it is not much less so: a good deal of time is wasted in writing and reading interesting stuff in an unilluminating manner.

In the course of my writing career, I am bound to explore diverse vistas and I know I oughtn't to prescribe to a uniform style for all occassions. This blog, and the one before it, being in the main reminders and pointers to myself, I have chosen to write in a didactic style, heavy, stilted and reeking of a Milton or a Carlyle ever so often. This style is odious to most but useful in situations where the ordered cadence of a sequence of sentences provides inspiration to the ordering of thoughts in the mind. Where I write about an incident or an amusing anecdote, I will assume a more bantering note designed to evoke participation in the merriment from the reader. Each occassion has as its prime concern a particular emotion or state of mind and my writing should reflect it in the highest degree possible; but in this blog I intend to provide general pointers to myself on the way I will carry my subject through.

I have to write spontaneously and extemporaneously often, as long thought may modify the pregnant impression an incident leaves in my mind - pregnant, for the impression achieves fruition only in expression. The style has to reflect the nature of the impression and convey much of my mood when I felt it. Words, malleable and suggestive in their import, and providing insight by means of their connection to certain phrases and occassions, will afford the reader burrowing into the warren of sentences I write, a certain pleasure, both on account of the industry and achievement of the reader and the use of language to suggest beyond the mere surface of things. Every now and then, even a slip is advisable, and, in hindsight, I will declare my errors to be volitional, and pass on as the brook that babbles on leaving stones unturned on its way to the ocean.

Flowery language has been my besetting sin and I will work on scrupulously avoiding the style that I have used in these last two blog, viz., embellishing little content with much adornment. I will paint on the canvas the virgin impression as I felt it and let the reader make of it what he will, myself paring my fingernails in the background and asserting every now and then an unvoiced assent or dissent at an independent interpretation. I will foist on the reader the burden of drawing conclusions as often as I can, and, even in the conclusions I seem to draw myself, often hide another possibilty. I will use the parchment I write on as a palimpsest, overlaying one idea over another and obscuring in the brightness of a conclusion a hidden and more luminous flame. I will portray but never caricature; illuminate but never delineate; assert but never to justify; and learn more than I venture to illustrate.

In all, I will learn to write so I may write to learn more than I know and achieve a synthesis in my writing of the thoughts, the perceptions and the acts that define my relation to the external world.

Why I Blog

As I set myself down to serious blogging, I wonder what really makes me want to blog. I know this thought has been around since I wrote my first blog but now I have decided to frame for myself a manifesto, a creed, so to say, that I will follow through the rest of my blogging days as strictly as possible. A manifesto, of course, sounds grand and impressive but it is useful too, in the sense that I get a clear idea as to what I expect of myself through blogging; and, as a bonus, I get a nice, easy and well-set path to follow and fall back on all through the long journeys that I perceive myself as taking in the future.

This I believe to be important for I often wander along unknown alleys in my thoughts, and get lost in the mad jumble that arises out of an inability on my part to control and order the way my mind turns. Often ideas slip through my mind that I would like to set down on paper but they are pushed on and out of my mind by others too impatient to wait their turn. A well-defined manifesto and a conscientious setting-down of all I would like preserved of my thoughts is in order and hence this attempt.

I believe that nothing is new under the sun except perceptions. All the nice quotes one frames, all the marvellous ideas one hits upon are not original in the sense that they could not have been the quotes or the ideas of someone else in the past. As Emerson says, we hear reflected back to us our own thoughts in the mouth of genius, bold enough to publish them. What is new in every creative enterprise is not the potential of the creator but the actual, created object or idea. It is the venture itself that is new and not the possibility of it and so what needs to be recorded with great understanding is the realisation of a potential and not a wonder at its being possible. What is important and interesting is the phenomenon itself and what is new is our perception of it.

I believe that phenomena and their observations need to be recorded so they may be understood; and they need to be understood not so we may wonder at their beauty or felicity but that we may know that much is possible for each one of us and so set ourselves to the accomplishment of our potential. Every man is capable of certain things and though all may not have the same potential, all may realise their particular potential and so be rewarded by the accomplishment itself; every other reward is secondary. Man's purpose or destiny is not visible to him but he may strive to attain it and in thus striving, he is encouraged by the proofs of other such endeavours.

I believe that in the realisation of my potential, I need to learn and use language as a means to the expression of ideas that flow through me and suggest the possibility of my establishing an outpost in the dense thickets that surround the world around my perceptions. I need to find answers to questions that trouble me and I need to test the validity of the answers I come up with in the world I experience. To achieve this, I need to express my perceptions and frame my questions and answers in black and white and receive feedback from the world I conduct my conversations with.

I believe all social interaction is a great conversation tending in some sense towards the resolution of primal questions many are troubled with in the course of their existence. I believe the way to realise my potential is to participate in this conversation and record it and this I can achieve only by constantly rejuvenating my thoughts by observing them.

Finally, I believe blogging is ideal for me to reach my ends. A regular and spontaneous recording of my particular thoughts and a constant review of the opinions that others have regarding what interests me will be an easy and entertaining method of self-improvement.

And, of course, I can take out some of my frustrations and anger on my writing and freak out in a controlled manner(?!) :D.